Slaughterhouse

In this reportage for SIOL I have turned my lens towards workers in the biggest slaughterhouse in Slovenia. Their bloody routine at work is physically and psychologically demanding. But somebody has to do the job to attend the consumption (around 25 kilos of beef per capita in Slovenia and 40 kilos in Brazil for example). In this slaughterhouse in Slovenia, 20 workers kill, cut and clean around 22.000 cows per year (around 110 per day). Anže Erjavec, a young farmer’s son, is one of them. He attended school for slaughterhouse workers, but admits that only practicing the job prepares you to face the challenges of hard work in such conditions.

The process takes less than half an hour from a living animal to pieces in the fridge. The majority of people avoid hearing or talking about the slaughterhouse, either because they are against killing animals for food, or because they don’t want to get into details of the origin of the stake on their plate.

This reportage shows the work in a slaughterhouse in photos, and has workers talking about beginnings, the routine and how they face the questions of life and death of the animals in a separate video.